Architect and Designer James Sale Joined us from his practice Co-DB (Collaborative design and build) to lead our popular architecture inspired course. Describing themselves as a team of experienced designers, doers and makers they are well placed to help children tackle large scale building projects, encouraging them to solve problems and see opportunities wherever they arise.

Over the last month I have been looking at a range of architectural projects that use materials in interesting ways. Matt and Fiona exhibited a wonderful project at the Whitechapel Gallery showing how a group of children collaborated on designing their own ‘Room for Art’

My son’s cub group explored how to create a structure using marshmallows and spaghetti.

And at the exclusive Mayfair Gallery, Hauser and Wirth Polish artist Monika Sosnowska explores materials in a very architectural and sculptural way.

I collected a vast array of materials for the children to experiment with in this 2 day workshop We like to give children opportunities to use new and exciting materials that will stretch the imagination. As the children arrived they were asked to draw together, exploring the word architecture.

Very quickly their ideas about buildings came to life on the paper.

We then did some physical activities to make buildings with our bodies

And explored structures with single sheets of paper.

Challenge number one was to build a bridge to support a box of rubbers.

Children experimented with tearing, folding and crumpling, testing their ideas as they went.

We found that more folds make a stronger bridge.

We then measured the room and learnt to draw a scaled plan which we will build on over the 2 days

We then began to explore our materials. Challenge 2, was to build the tallest tower that could suspend a single shoe.

Some groups nearly got to the ceiling!

Some structures became quite sculptural.

We measured them all to see which was the tallest.

After lunch we were given the task to build a structure that we could get inside. This kept us busy for the rest of the afternoon!

We worked in teams, cutting, joining and solving problems as we went

Our buildings turned into factories, houses, shelters and dens.

We added windows and doors.

Decorative elements

We even began to create pets to live with us!

Someone built a dungeon

We added curtains and pictures .

Lots of small details started to emerge

We ended the day by climbing into our buildings and making a plan for how to develop them tomorrow.

We also started to map them onto our plan.

We can’t wait to see how these individual buildings develop tomorrow, how we join them together to make a city and how we map them on our plans.